1. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to information handling systems, and, more particularly, to serial communication bus ports.
2. Background Information
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is an information handling system. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
There are many applications where it is desirable that individual USB ports be disabled, such as computers, servers or blades that have various internal and external ports. Past, current and known future planned chipsets for servers offer the ability only to disable all ports, none of the ports or only ports in pairs and in only a descending order. In order to get around this limitation, many server platform designers implement a USB hub that is internal to the platform so that the users can drive the hub or disable USB ports using a general purpose input/output (GPIO) facility to turn off the USB hub. Unfortunately, the separate USB hub solution for disabling USB connections consumes about one square inch of board real estate per instantiation on tight layouts such as control panels and blade servers. In addition to taking up valuable board real estate, a USB hub also consumes power. Furthermore, some applications do not handle booting from ports that are behind a certain number of USB hubs (e.g., 5 for some common BIOS versions).